How to Heal your Gut & WHY!!!

The one thing that has been missing from discussions and education about healthy lifestyles is the how critical it is to heal your gut & make sure it stays that way!

There is more and more research suggesting that a “leaky gut” could be the underlying cause of many diseases that face modern humans and that it can perpetuate inflammation in the body that wreaks havoc on general health & well-being. In order to discuss this further, we need to start with some basics.

The basics:

1)The gut is essentially a long tube that forms a barrier to the outside word that selectively allowspenetration of essential nutrients, vitamins, etc… thatwe need to survive and thrive. Many hormones aresecreted by the gut and interestingly these hormonescan have both peripheral and central effects.

2)As mothers approach birth theirvaginal population change in order to expose the babyto as many good bacteria as possible – this is evidencedby lower numbers of good bacteria in the guts of childrenfrom c-section birth.

3)The gut houses approximately 100 trillionbacteria and this population of bacteria is around 10 times

Antibiotic therapy will essentially hit the reset button on our good bacteria, indiscriminately wiping them out. It then becomes critical that we repopulate our gut with beneficial bacteria and that’s where I believe most of us including Western Medicine practitioners drop the ball.

If the intestinal barrier becomes permeable (leaky gut), large protein molecules escape into the bloodstream that normally would not have penetrated. Since these proteins are not recognized by the body, the body mounts an immune response to them and attacks them. Studies show that these attacks can play a role in the development of autoimmune diseases like Hashimoto’s, Type 1 Diabetes, Multiple Sclerosis and more. This immune response brought on by “leaky gut” has been shown to affect not only the gut itself, but also other organs including the skeletal system, pancreas, kidney, liver and the brain. Additionally, it’s been shown that “leaky gut” can manifest problems in the skin and heart.

What you can do to make sure your Gut stays healthy?

Eliminate exposure to toxic substances in food. Substances to try to avoid:

FODMAPs intolerance – Fermentable Oligosaccharides, Disaccharides, Monosaccharides and Polyols – these are short-chain carbohydrates that are incompletely absorbed in the gut & can be easily fermented by Gut bacteria – the fermentation & osmosis caused by these undigested sugars cause major IBS symptoms such as gas, pain & diarrhea.

There’s so much more that could be discussed, but I’ll leave that to the experts. If you’re interested in having a full assessment done on the state of your gut health, track down a good functional medicine doctor in your area who can help you handle this. Two sites that can help you are the Paleo physicians network & Primal Docs.

Until next time, make sure you’re taking care of your gut & the Trillions of bacteria in it, and in turn, they will take care of you!Dan T